


Mother of Victory

by jennifercharter



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Bellamy Blake is a History & Mythology Nerd, John Murphy-centric (The 100), Post-Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-28 19:33:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21142049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jennifercharter/pseuds/jennifercharter
Summary: John Murphy was in a coma for a week after he tried Monty's first batch of Algae.OR, Clarke Griffin haunts them all and Bellamy spends their downtime entertaining them with Greek Mythology.





	Mother of Victory

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my unpublished folder for a WHILE. I've mostly stopped posting fics due to grad school and working two jobs. Someday, I will jump back in and finish my folder of works. 
> 
> John Murphy has to be one of my favorite characters of the 100, complex, but also very simple at times, and always smarter than he's willing to let on.

Murphy isn’t sure when it becomes a thing. They’re all so busy the first few days, and even weeks. But somehow, in the middle of the bustle, they all end up there at some point, staring down through the large window.

The Earth is still burning.

He wonders sometimes if it will ever stop burning.

Anyway, it becomes his thing. He has no mechanical skills, no farm skills, nothing. He’s just here, so somehow, he becomes the watchman for the ground, occasionally helping someone with their tasks.

The others check in occasionally, not on him, but on their home. 

Emori and Echo are there most often. Echo doesn’t speak, she just stares. 

Bellamy spent the whole day there on the first day that wasn’t spent fearing for their lives. Murphy found him there that first day, staring down, his eyes as dead as the planet below. Murphy had frozen, without a clue what to say, and then slunk away, feeling useless and found Raven. Murphy doesn’t know what she said, and he doesn’t ask.

Bellamy never came back after that. He passes through on his way somewhere else, but he barely glances out at Earth. He’s too determined to stay busy, and he always finds a way to be busy.

Murphy gets it. Kind of. 

They’ve all watched people they love die. Sometimes, Murphy thinks that’s all they’re meant for.

Bellamy, though. Bellamy is haunted.

Murphy wonders if it’s Clarke or Octavia that makes Bellamy sleep less than anyone else. He wonders if the idiot ever told Clarke how important she was to him. 

He watches Emori and wonders what it would be like to never love her, to never have known her. He watches her scavenge this hell and then smile at him and thinks she’s crazy, but God, he’s glad she’s his. He might have cared about some of the people left in the bunker, but he’s not sure he ever loved any of them, and he never loved anyone the way he loves her. 

He watches Raven and wonders if he can ever be forgiven, if he’ll ever earn it. Raven had found him that first week, when he was realizing he had no real use amongst scavengers and geniuses. She had brought him the extra bag of rations. Clarke’s bag. She hadn’t had to say anything, and he hadn’t either. They’d just nodded at each other and he’d taken the bag and added it into their inventory. If they were reverent about it that was between them. If Raven cried, he kept her secret.

Murphy had understood the girl who became Wanheda. So maybe he’s imagined the reverence, but when he thinks of the Ark princess that saved him… He wonders why it always had to be Clarke to give herself up for everyone else. He wonders if Bellamy will always freeze at the mention of her name.

He wonders if he’ll ever stop hearing the way Bellamy said “I left her” in the moments before they got onto the Ark.

Bellamy isn’t the only one haunted, not that Murphy will ever tell him that.

Because they left her. Bellamy loved her, and Monty and Harper respected her, and Raven is grateful, and Echo understands the idea of Wanheda and Emori doesn’t have a clue, not really.

Murphy watched an Ark princess learn how to survive, and save them in the process, again and again.

Then, finally, Monty’s first batch of algae is ready, but he’s afraid of it, this hope he’s grown. He’s quiet about it, but Murphy recognizes the look on his face.

Someday, he needs to sit down and really realize that he knows these people better than even he ever knew. Is that what it means to be what’s left of the original 100?

What’s left of the original 100…. That’s a thought that makes him want to vomit.

He doesn’t want to think about it. Introspection isn’t his thing. So, he huffs out a breath, and volunteers, and ignores the worried looks he gets, and holds up the soup like stuff as if to toast. But of the thousand smartass things he could say, none of them fit the moment, so he downs it, and almost spits it out. “Gross, man.”

Monty huffs a nervous laugh. “Sorry.”

Murphy shrugs, then settles back in his seat for Monty to ask him his questions. 

It isn’t like nausea at first. It’s just a wrongness.

He wavers in spot, and Monty frowns. “What is it?”

Oh, dizziness probably isn’t good. “Not good, man.”

For a minute Monty frowns. “Because it tastes bad, or?” He steps forward and Murphy realizes he’s not just dizzy, he’s stumbling. “Murphy?”

“Damn, I wish Clarke was here,” he mutters, and everything goes dark on the haunted face that Bellamy is making.

When he opens his eyes, he’s back on Earth. He sits up slowly, expecting… something, but he doesn’t know what.

He’s in a field. In the distance he can see a hill and he can hear running water to his right. He stands and he can see a river.

“Do you have your payment?”

He blinks at the voice behind him and turns and almost chokes, not only at the girl before him, but because there’s a coin in his mouth. He reaches up and yanks it out, never taking his eyes off the girl. “Charlotte?”

The girl grins at him, clutching a weapon at her side, and he realizes with a rush of horror that it’s his old knife, and the blood on it must be Jaha’s. 

God, he’s in hell.

“She asked if you have payment.” And speak of the devil.

“What is this?” Murphy staggers back from the Chancellor’s son, long dead but still haunting him. “What is happening?”

“You’re dying,” Ontari says coldly, appearing next to Wells Jaha, smirking. “And to cross the river, you have to pay.”

“No, no, this isn’t real.” He shook his head. “I’m dreaming.”

“Yeah,” says Finn’s voice behind him. “Or you’re dying.” When Murphy turns, he’s holding his hand out. “You’ll cross the Styx, and then it’s all over for you. It’s easy.”

And one by one, they are appearing. The men and women Murphy have known, the ones he’s killed. The ones he didn’t save. He sees the other delinquents, all gone now. He sees his parents, staring at him with judgement in their eyes. 

“No, no, this isn’t real.”

“John Murphy.”

“No.” He shook his head, refusing to look up, not at her. “Please, no.”

“John Murphy, it’s okay,” the voice says loudly in the distance, and around him he can feel the ghosts shifting away from him.

“This isn’t real. This is because Bellamy has been telling us myths, and they’re all to do with death, because he’s in a mood, and my head is already messed up, so I’m making this up.”

“John Murphy, look at me.”

He looks up, because he can’t ignore the command in the voice, which, after everything, is almost hilarious. Once, he’d hated her for trying to give him orders.

Clarke is standing at the riverbank, watching him with a small smile he’s never seen on her face. He’d expected her to look the way they’d left her, or maybe bloody and broken or burned and disfigured.

But this Clarke is someone he caught a glimpse of only in those early moments on the ground, so damn long ago. Her hair is long and swept to the side in the clean, sharp braid that most women on the Ark had worn. There is no blood on her clothes, no holes either. She looks… whole… in a way he doesn’t really understand. She smirks and waves her hand. “Be gone.” 

Around him the others simply disappear.

Her eyes are the same and her voice… He hates this. “God, I’m really dead, aren’t I? The algae killed me?”

“Not yet,” she says and tilts her head at him. “Will you walk with me?”

He’s caught so off guard that he gapes at her. “What?”

“It’s not a hard question, John Murphy.”

He blinks. “I don’t understand.”

“Walk with me to the river,” she says almost gently, and turns away towards the water. “Did you know that the Styx wasn’t just a route to the Underworld? It could make you invulnerable, could save you even.”

He follows without really thinking about it. “Clarke, is this hell?”

She looks at him over her shoulder and smiles again, and it’s so wrong, the expression. Not because she doesn’t deserve to smile, but because… well, it doesn’t seem right for some reason. “No.”

“Then where are we?”

“You’re very sick.”

“The algae?” She nods slightly. “And what, you’re here to help me cross over?”

She shakes her head. “No, John Murphy. I’m here because you needed a friendly face.”

He snorts and glances over his shoulder to where the dead that greeted him had stood. “Well, you’re definitely a better choice than them.”

“It is a choice.”

He turns back to her. “What?”

“You have to choose. You might even make it and go back to your life. Or you can let go.” She motions at the river and he sees a small boat at its bank. “Give me the coin, and your suffering ends.”

“Because we’re supposed to give the boat guy the coin to cross into the Underworld, or something. Bellamy told us this story, the first night.”

She smiles. “Tell me what weighs your choice.”

“I don’t understand.”

She holds her hands up and moves them up and down like a scale. “To let go, or to fight. What is your life, John Murphy?”

A thousand things flash through him. Guilt, fear, and so much anger. It would be easy, he thinks, not for the first or even the hundredth time. Let go. No more fighting. Then, he frowns. “Why do you keep calling me that? You always called me Murphy. Too many guys named John when the hundred landed.”

She smirks. “I will call you whatever you want.”

He frowns and takes a step back, understanding suddenly. “You’re not Clarke.”

“I never said I was.”

He hangs his head and scoffs. “I thought, for a minute…”

“That she was here to greet you, to go with you to the other side? Clarke Griffin isn’t here. You are.”

“Then why look like her?” He shook his head. “Why am I even having this conversation? I know why my brain picked you. You’re the savior. The last person I left behind to die.”

“Clarke Griffin made her choice. She knew the satellite needed to be aligned. She knew that Monty needed to be saved. She didn’t even hesitate. She put her people first. She completed her mission.”

He looked up at her. “What happened to her?”

“Does it matter?” She smirked again, and he was reminded of a Grounder virus. “Her story isn’t yours.”

“Yeah? What’s her story?”

She shook her head. “I once stood at my King’s side as Clarke stood at Bellamy’s. She wrote his name down to save him, and I saved my king and swore allegiance. He put her name on the list, and my king gave me a kingdom of rivers.”

He shook his head. “I’ve really lost my mind, haven’t I? Clarke died to save us, but I don’t exactly wax poetic about her.”

She smiles, and there are a thousand secrets in that smile. “John Murphy, does your choice revolve around a girl that gave her life for yours? Is that all you are? All you care about?”

“Of course not.” He glares. “Half the time I didn’t even like her.”

She nodded. “But it wasn’t necessary for you to, was it? That’s not how family works.” She tilted her head at him again. “And your family on the Ark? Does your choice revolve around them?”

“They don’t need me.” He sighed, looking out over the river. “I got back to space and you know what the Ark ever did for me? Nothing. I had a purpose on Earth. Surviving. I’m good at it. You get me back on the Ark? I stop being me. It’s like I needed to be down there to be alive.”

“Maybe you should think more of yourself, rather than the others around you.”

It brings him back for a moment to a conversation he had with Clarke. You need a selfish bastard, I’m your man, he had said. It’s not even a question. “Emori.” He frowns. “I’m not dying here. I’m going back, for her.”

Clone Clarke smiled. “Then go back.”

He blinked. “That’s it?”

“What were you expecting?”

He looks over to where the dead were standing, but they’re still gone. “I don’t-” He huffed a laugh. “I expected a fight. Some epic quest, maybe? That’s what Bellamy says Greek myths are all about.”

“Not all fights are against others. Sometimes, the worst battles are with ourselves.”

“Wow,” Murphy said, then he grinned. “Now, that sounds exactly like something Bellamy would say.”

This smile is bright, and Murphy hopes for a moment that Bellamy got to see it, at least once. He sobers. “Is she at peace? Did she have to go through this hallucination underworld crap?”

“Clarke Griffin has her own battles to fight.” 

“Yeah, that sounds about right, too. But, you know, for this happening in my head, I was kind of hoping I’d lie to myself and say she was okay.”

“Of course, it is happening inside your head, John Murphy, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

He blinks and then he snorts. “My mom used to read me those books.”

“They’re probably still in a computer somewhere, along with movies, and television shows, and a thousand other things. Emori might like it.” 

He hadn’t thought about that. He stands straighter. “Good idea.”

She looks past him, and he turns and sees a man in the distance looking around. He really must be losing his mind, because it almost looks like Jahar. He looks back to Clarke with raised eyebrows. “Another lost soul?”

Clone Clarke smiled indulgently and held out a cup to him that he hadn’t even noticed her carrying. “Promise me, something, John Murphy. Promise me that Clarke Griffin didn’t stay behind so that you can all tear each other apart again.” When he takes a breath, she turns a sharp glare on him. “But do not swear if you don’t mean it. Men and gods who swear upon me cannot break such an oath.”

He scoffed, a thousand sarcastic responses on his tongue, but he settles on a scathing tone. “Swear upon you?” He frowns at the cup in his hand. “Who are you?”

“I am Styx.”

“Is that who you are? The river of the dead? Do you have the power to make me invulnerable and make me keep my promises?”

“You have that power already,” she said softly, her smile sad. “You all do, children of Gaia.”

“Styx was the river, right?” He shook his head. “Not a person.”

“I am not a person.” For a moment, Clone Clarke… wavers, for lack of a better word, and Murphy has this terrible sense that she is something very very scary. His brain is so messed up. “Make your oath, John Murphy, or don’t.”

Murphy hesitated, suddenly aware that this meant something to the figment of his imagination. Sure, what the Hell. If his subconscious wants him to give Clarke some kind of peace of mind, he can do that. “I can’t promise we won’t all fall apart. But I can promise we’ll always save each other, somehow.” At her smile he shrugged. “I swear to protect them. That work?”

She nodded very slightly and waited for him to drink from the cup. He had expected something… water, maybe? Whiskey? Instead it’s an explosion of flavor that he can’t really identify, sweet and heavy.

“You will be well, John Murphy.”

“Well, I’m just so relieved,” he muttered, but his voice didn’t hold much bite to it. He blinked and the cup was gone.

She gestured at the boat. “Go back to your Emori. Go back to your people.” 

He nodded and turned to get in the boat, starting to wonder about his sanity. Then he stopped and looked back where she was watching him, smiling. “Hey, uh, listen. I know you’re not her. And I know this is in my head, but uh.” He worked his jaw back and forth and then shrugged. “Thanks, Clarke. You saved us. I’m sorry you died.”

She shook her head. “It will be a bumpy ride, John Murphy. Hold fast.”

“Yeah, like that’s not prophetic.” He climbed into the boat and as it moved away from shore, guided by his own imagination apparently, he watched as she moved away, towards the Thelonious Jaha look-alike, and couldn't quite fight the urge he had to cry.

Then he closed his eyes.

When he opened them again he blinked once, twice, and then frowned. “Where the hell am I?” It came out as more of a croak and when he tried to swallow his throat was as dry as a desert.

“Murphy?!” A face appeared above him, then darted away to turn on a light in the corner of the room. “Oh my God, you’re awake!”

“Harper?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s me. Hang on, okay? I have to get the others.”

He came awake with a deep breath and felt someone lay their hand on his shoulder. “Clarke?”

The hand moved away, and Bellamy came into his view, his eyebrows scrunched together. “You with me?”

Murphy blinked and closed his eyes for a minute, then nodded. “Yeah.”

There was the shuffling of footsteps and he turned his head enough to see Bellamy settle back into a chair. “Where’s Emori?”

“Sleeping. We’re taking shifts.” He shrugged. “Found some medical texts in the database you were talking about, but to be fair we’re just winging it, man.”

“Yeah,” Murphy muttered. “I told you about that?”

“Yeah, man. You uh, you’ve been saying a lot of stuff.”

“Awesome,” Murphy muttered.

“Harper said... “Bellamy cleared his throat. “She said you were muttering in your sleep, right before you woke up the first time. And just now… you’re dreaming about Clarke?” His voice catches on her name.

Murphy scoffed. “Man, I had the weirdest fucking dream.” And he tells him, beginning to end, with Bellamy saying nothing the entire time. When the silence stretched too long he sighed. “Sorry, man, don’t know if I’ve said it yet.”

“I didn’t tell you that.”

“That you’re sorry?”

“No.” Bellamy shifted forward, and Murphy saw focus on his face for the first time in who knew how long that didn’t have to do with their survival. “I didn’t talk about Styx.”

“The river the dead go down? Uh, yeah, you did.”

“That’s not what she said though. She was talking about herself. It sounds like she was Styx.”

“My head hurts.”

“Styx was a goddess. She was a Titan. She followed Zeus when he overthrew the Titans.” Bellamy smiled distantly. "She was mother to Nike, the goddess of victory."

Murphy frowned. “If you try to tell me that I was visited by a Greek goddess while I was in a coma, I am going to think you’ve completely come unhinged.”

Bellamy seems to consider his next words carefully, but then he looks away and shakes his head. “Of course not.”

Murphy nods sharply without looking at him. “Besides, Clarke’s gone. No more battles for her to fight.”

“Yeah.”

He looked over. “Bellamy.”

“What?”

“Have you said it?”

“Of course.” At least he didn’t pretend not to know what Murphy meant.

“Say it.”

“Fuck off, Murphy.”

Murphy thinks for a minute, then sighs. “Did she know?”

“Seriously? Fuck off.”

“The dream... she was clean and unharmed. She was… Just, tell me one thing, seriously. Did you ever see her smile at you like you meant something? Because Emori smiles at me like that and it’s why I keep living. It’s why I wanted to come back.”

Bellamy stood and glared at him. “I’ll get someone in here with you.”

“She didn’t die for us so that you would fucking kill yourself. Or so that we would never say her name out loud. We’re tiptoeing around it, and worshipping a ghost, but none of us say her name.”

Bellamy stopped, his back to him.

“Raven and I went through her rations, but we didn’t fucking say a word. It was like a religious fucking ritual. Clarke Griffin died for us, just so we won’t even talk about her? That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy muttered, and sighed deeply. “Yeah.” He turned back. “I saw her smile at me like I mattered. I saw her cry because I was hurt, and she hurt me. I saw everything, Murphy, when it came to her. And she might not have known. That’s on me. But I always knew.  
And Clarke Griffin didn’t die so that we’d make ourselves forget her.”

“Exactly.” He relaxes back against the bed. “You and her saving each other, over and over again. Maybe that’ll be a myth in a couple thousand years,” he chuckled.

“We did. Always.” Bellamy scoffed. “You know, she wrote out a list of a hundred people to go in the bunker.”

Murphy winced. “Yeah, Monty and Harper mentioned it. Bet you made the list, huh?”

“I did. It pissed me off, because she didn’t put herself on it. So, I did it for her.”

Murphy frowns, something catching in the back of his mind. “What?”

“I told her if I was on that list, she was on it, and I wrote her name in.”

Murphy pushed himself up. “Seriously?”

“That surprises you?” 

“Styx, the goddess. Did she save Zeus’ life?”

“Yeah, that’s why the river is named after her.”

“A kingdom of rivers,” he muttered, and fell back. “No fucking way.”

“What?”

Murphy thought for a moment about explaining, but then he sighed and closed his eyes. “Nothing man.” He shook his head, then huffed at the pain and dizziness. “My head hurts.”

Later, much later, when the algae is keeping them alive, and John is starting to realize his uselessness, he still wonders at it, at the impossibility. 

It doesn’t matter, not really. They have adjusted well enough now, after all this time. They can say Clarke’s name without hesitation, though Bellamy’s voice still hiccups occasionally. Echo is starting… something… that’s helping with that.

It had caught Murphy off guard, to say the least. He had watched their inept flirting and felt a flash of nostalgia that was as much about what might have been as anything else. He’d spent a couple of hours that day staring down at the Earth, no longer burning. The smoke was clearing, a little more each day. 

Harper swore she’d spotted some green, but they couldn’t be sure yet.

He stops speaking about Clarke, about anything from before, and slowly he begins to drift even from Emori. He knows he’s hurting her, but he’s not sure how to stop.

So instead he finds himself a window in one of the few isolated areas left. Bellamy finds him more often than not.

When Emori leaves him, finally, too soon, it’s Bellamy that finds him then too. He snarls and snarks at him, but Bellamy takes it, and shrugs it off, and Murphy wants to hate him for it, he really does.

But they got drunk one night, when Bellamy and Echo were first getting serious, and Bellamy told him about the heart and the head, and Murphy can’t hate him, not really. 

Because every time Bellamy finds him, it’s Clarke, that spectre that never really fades, that is speaking using Bellamy’s voice.

Bellamy isn’t the only one haunted. She haunts them all.

Monty and Harper respected her, and Raven is grateful, and Echo and Emori still don’t have a clue, not really.

Some things, you had to be there for, and the stories don’t do it justice.

Sometimes, when his belly is full of the most disgusting nutrition ever, he still dreams of that Clarke that wasn’t Clarke, and she reminds him of his promise. 

If he prayed, and it’s a big if, he wouldn’t pray to God, but maybe, just sometimes, when he’s staring at the emerging green on Earth, sometimes he whispers that he’ll keep his promise.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Please leave a kudos and a comment!


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